It's here: the GIMP 2.8. Its biggest feature is something that many, many people have been requesting for as long as I can remember: single-window mode. No longer do you have to fiddle with a gazillion palette and dialog windows (unless you choose to do so, of course). Great work by the team.

Ok, if you want to actually be useful for the gimp devs, what are the most important features of photoshop that are missing? The full GEGL colorspace depth thing is going to be fixed in the next version, that seems pretty useful, and it sounds like the final nail in the coffin of CinePaint ( Formally known as the film Gimp).

I haven't tested GIMP extensively, and as I said in my first post, this version doesn't yet have a Windows binary. This is why I haven't complained about the feature set. From what I could figure from the changelog, though, some pretty basic stuff is just being added (like Layer Groups and on-canvas text editing). I don't care much about CMYK support, it's nice to have, but not relevant to my work and anyway print is slowly going the way of the dodo.

I think most rational people would be willing to use a product with a slightly worse looking UI if it did everything they needed and was free.

It depends - for casual use, sure. For professional work I don't know - if you earn money from this, you can and should probably afford better (or even the best) tools.

a slightly worse looking UI

I wouldn't say it's strictly about the looks, although to a degree they matter (that degree being plain ugliness). It's more about flexibility, workflow and ergonomics - stuff that someone who doesn't have a background in UI design can't figure that easily. It's not about just adding as many features as you can, it's about how you add them.